Welcome to the Shroomery Message Board! You are experiencing a small sample of what the site has to offer. Please login or register to post messages and view our exclusive members-only content. You'll gain access to additional forums, file attachments, board customizations, encrypted private messages, and much more!

Bonsai mushrooms* In spring and autumn you can frequently see tiny mushrooms growing close to the trunk of your bonsai. These are probably feeding on decaying organic matter in the soil, so are harmless and as often as not quite charming. They may even be the fruiting bodies of mycorrhizal fungi that actually benefit the tree by breaking down nutrients into a readily digestible form. But if you are the worrying type (or if there is honey fungus - armillaria in your area) here is a simple test. Gently pull the cap off one of the mushrooms and place it on a sheet of white paper for a few hours. When you lift it up it should have deposited a spore print on the paper. If this spore print is black, brown, purple - no problem. If it is pink - it may me armillaria. To reassure yourself, dig around in the soil to see if you can find black, shoelace-like strands of mycelium. If you do come across any - repot immediately, making whatever after-care provisions are appropriate and consult your nearest woodlands management agency for advice

if you like a mushroom that is mycorhizal, purchase seedlings of the host tree and wash the roots with some antifungal stuff ( bleach is a candidate, i believe) then rinse and dip in solution of fruitbodies or mycelia or spore matter (hard to come by sometimes...) and plant. i even believe that the same can be done (with varying chances of succes , obviously) by using fruitbody pieces in the soil mix. these things are subject to chance, but you could be the one with bonsai king boletes. try it .i want to. werd

Im going to try something like that this spring, but the bonsai part maybe next year or the year after. I'm not sure what kind of spruce it is but I think its black spruce that I collect king boletes under. I collected cones, but they may be pollen cones even though they have some winged seed in them. Have to put some more time into researching spruce trees.

Truffle bonsai would be really cool. I hope you get a chance to do it.